Arthur Jones

   Retired for 12 years, Remi J. De Roo, former bishop of Victoria, British Columbia, has been an unflagging apostle for and of the Second Vatican Council. His talks and retreats have taken him around the world, including twice to China, most recently last year. Yet in the nave of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, 50 years ago, this October, the world’s newest bishop in the world’s oldest church was, initially, somewhat overawed.
   “Seated in that magnificent setting, St. Peter’s,” De Roo said, “my first impression of the council was the sheer immensity of it, the awesome character of a gathering of bishops from all over the world. In their grand episcopal robes. In those days, ordinary people like me likened bishops to princes.

   Retired for 12 years, Remi J. De Roo, former bishop of Victoria, British Columbia, has been an unflagging apostle for and of the Second Vatican Council. His talks and retreats have taken him around the world, including twice to China, most recently last year. Yet in the nave of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, 50 years ago, this October, the world’s newest bishop in the world’s oldest church was, initially, somewhat overawed.
   “Seated in that magnificent setting, St. Peter’s,” De Roo said, “my first impression of the council was the sheer immensity of it, the awesome character of a gathering of bishops from all over the world. In their grand episcopal robes. In those days, ordinary people like me likened bishops to princes.
   “I was born on a small farm in southwest Manitoba in 1924, into a Flemish-speaking immigrant family. My parents and grandparents were from Belgian Flanders. I’d learned English in school as a 6-year-old. My father learned most of his English from me and my siblings.”
                                                                 Trick or Treat
   De Roo was ordained to the ministerial priesthood in 1950 for the St. Boniface, Manitoba, archdiocese. He gained his doctorate in Rome and served as assistant “in a fine parish, Holy Cross, with 1,100 families – finally as a pastor.” By the early 1960s, he was also working on the pre-Vatican Council preparation team of St. Boniface Archbishop Maurice Baudoux. Then, on Halloween in 1962, just as the three-week old council was settling in, De Roo was named bishop of Victoria. “Some people still aren’t sure whether it was a trick or a treat,” he said.
   Being Flemish-speaking (along with fluency in French, Latin, Italian and English) was a benefit to the young bishop, who arrived to take his assigned seat four weeks after the council began. Though they generally conversed in French, De Roo developed an important council friendship with Flemish-speaking Cardinal Leo Joseph Suenens of Mechelen-Brussels, Belgium.
   “Suenens,” De Roo said, “was one of the policy setters, the one who initially suggested the council must not only be centered on itself, ad intra, but open to the world, ad extra. That was accepted as a policy and led to the formulation of the document Gaudium et Spes, ‘The Church in the Modern World.’ Suenens and his team from Louvain were key players in that unexpected development, the council’s longest document.”
   Rome’s hotels during the council sessions hung out “no room at the inn” signs. The city was so crowded, religious houses were asked to open their doors to council attendees. De Roo stayed with the “Marianisti” – the Marianist Brothers – along with seven others. He was part of the Canadian contingent and admired Montreal Cardinal Paul-Emile Léger, who was active in debates. “Though not an eminent scholar himself,” De Roo said, “Léger surrounded himself with outstanding scholars, listened to them, and presented their ideas as well as his own.”
   One was the Dominican theologian Jean-Marie Roger Tillard, a peritus to the Canadian bishops. De Roo’s friendship with the Dominican lasted until Tillard’s death. Tillard was a specialist in the sacraments and the Eucharist. He was a committed and important ecumenist.
   In the years after the council, De Roo said, “we both were critical of some decisions that appear somewhat retrograde, but we both were people of hope. Tillard wrote a book about why he stayed in the church” (I Believe, Despite Everything: Reflections of an Ecumentist, 2003).
                                                            Memoirs
   Retired bishop De Roo’s own memoir (just published by Novalis) shifts from discussion from the news-making “stuff that concerns sociologists to a deeper understanding of the role of the Holy Spirit. The church is not just a set of structures, no matter how important institutions are, but much more than that. The church is a movement. It is the movement of the Holy Spirit in history centered on the person of Jesus Christ. Gaudium et Spres presents Christ as the model of the human, particularly Article 22. That, I think, is a key insight of Vatican II: restoring the Christocentric presentation of the church; the fact that the church is more a question of relationships than structures.”
   De Roo made four council speeches: on the lay apostolate, ministry and the life of priests, the sacramental nature of marital intimacy, and his “particular concern, the unity of God’s creative and salutary redemptive plan, the fact that we must not have a dichotomy between things spiritual and things temporal – as we used to say in thos days. Rather, that laypeople are responsible, as baptized and gifted members, not only for the life of the church, but in a very special way, for bringing Gospel values for the transformation of society. The laity, as Pius XII reminded a group of cardinals in 1946, are not in the church, they are the church.”
   Post-council, the Victoria bishop visited all his parishes, beginning with the remote ones, and began a process that led to a 1986-91 diocesan synod. In small groups Catholics discussed their experience of the faith in their local environment – home, parish, work – their experience of the church in the broader context, in the world around them. “In light of that,” he said, “we asked for suggestions for the well-being and the future development of our own diocese.”
   At the conclusion of a series of orientations for the entire diocese, “we declared our diocese to be a synodal church: In other words, we picked up on the very roots of our faith. Recall the Council of Jerusalem in the Acts of the Apostles, the first manifestation of how the church is meant to work: in a circle, the people in community, in communion with each other and consulting with each other. In the circle,” he said, “everyone is equal in dignity and capacity to serve. It’s where we become a listening church, and where the hierarchy is seen not as teachers, but as fellow pilgrims and listeners in their own right.”
                                                             Resistance
   There was resistance. “That’s understandable,” he said. “People are always cautious when something new is presented. Not many knew that the synod is one of the most ancient institutions in the church, so different from their previous experience: church in the vertical sense, the pyramid.”
   The synodal church, however, “was fulfilling Vatican II’s major orientations: one, returning to our roots; two, through aggiornamento – embracing appropriate adaptations; and three, allowing the church to continue to grow and unfold in history – particularly through the celebration of the Eucharist and the service to humankind.”
   Said De Roo, “I went beyond what you read in canon law – that these auxiliary bodies are merely consultative. Until I retired I used them as policy formation bodies – I see us all together in the process of reaching decisions by communal discernment: [Belgian Cardinal Joseph] Cardijn’s Catholic worker movement – ‘see, judge, act.’”
   De Roo evangelizes and re-evangelizes with the council’[s documents. “People want to know if we can still have faith in the kind of world we live in today. I keep reminding them this is much larger than our human efforts – this is the movement of the Holy Spirit. I tell them the reign of God is coming about – that the Holy Spirit works in a special way through the church, but is not limited to working through visible church structures.”
   NCR interviewed De Roo, who turns 90 shortly after the council anniversary gets under way, after he’d returned from giving a retreat and talks in Hawaii. “We must,” he said, “come to look at the signs of the time, the movement of the Spirit in every sphere of life. In my travels, I see a lot of very dedicated people, people who take the Vatican Council seriously and are accepting their co-responsibility as Christians. As a result of Vatican II we have to move from the morality of precepts – where we are dominated by observances and certain actions and formulas, etc. – into an ethic of responsibility in every sphere of the world that touches our daily existence.”